love-in-mind-palace:

dickeddowndetective:

wsswatson:

Luckily for you, I’m in a good mood, so I’m going to go through this nice and rationally.

1. Yes, as a matter of fact, I am aware of that. As it happens, I’m an English literature undergrad, and have not only read all 4 novels and 56 short stories, but studied them extensively.
2. Perhaps you’re unaware of other adaptations, so let me inform you that in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Holmes is gay (see point 6), in Elementary, Watson is a woman, Moriarty is also Irene Adler and the series is set in New York, and in Basil the Great Mouse Detective, the characters are mice. Also, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle cared very little for Sherlock Holmes, even going as far to say that ‘If in 100 years I am only known as the man who invented Sherlock Holmes then I will have considered my life a failure’, and, despite claiming that ‘Holmes is as inhuman as a Babbage’s Calculating Machine, and just about as likely to fall in love’ in 1892, he later wrote a play, and when appealed to by William Gillette, who was to portray Holmes, for permission to alter his character, Doyle replied ‘You may marry him, murder him, or do anything you like to him.’ He didn’t care about his characters being altered.
3. You are completely avoiding sociohistorical context. Between 1887 and 1927, men could not marry men and women could not marry women. In fact, homosexuality was a criminal offence in Britain until 1967 and the Marriage Equality Bill was only passed in England THIS YEAR. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s close friend, Oscar Wilde, was sentenced to two years of hard labour as punishment for ‘gross indecency’, i.e. homosexuality. Do you know what was used against him in court? The Picture of Dorian Gray – his novel – because it contained queer subtext. Doyle wanted to portray Watson as a heart in contrast to Holmes’ head, and as such, he had to be romantic. Hetero romance was the only option in the period in which he was writing. Also, arguably the only reason that Watson was even originally given a wife was that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wanted to conclude the Sherlock Holmes narrative after The Sign of Four, and so needed a reason for Holmes and Watson to go their separate ways. When he then returned to it, Mary’s presence made the stories clunky through Watson’s repetitive descriptions of how Holmes would contact him and he’d say goodbye to Mary to go with him on a case, and so Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made use of a time jump to write Mary out in a single line when he made his third reluctant revival of the narrative with The Adventure of the Empty House.
4. That said, the canon did contain plenty of queer subtext which queer literary critics have been studying since its publication.
5. Men don’t have to be straight to marry women. Wilde was not straight, and he was married to a woman called Constance Lloyd. Biromantic/sexual and panromantic/sexual men marry women. That doesn’t make them unable to also experience romantic and/or sexual attraction to men. John never says that he is straight, only that he isn’t gay (true) and isn’t Sherlock’s date (also true). That’s very open-ended phrasing that doesn’t rule out attraction to men/a man (and, in fact, series 3 creates plenty of space for a bisexual reading).
6. The writers were influenced by The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes* (on which Mark Gatiss said: ‘The relationship between Sherlock and Watson is treated beautifully; Sherlock effectively falls in love with him in the film’ and on which the writer, Billy Wilder, said that he wished he’d had the ability to make Holmes unambiguously gay) and deliberately establish queer subtext (and outright text). In fact, at Anatomy of a Hit, they said that they regard all adaptations to be part of an ongoing canon, and draw as much influence from them as from the original canon. For instance, A Scandal in Belgravia was much more closely based on The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes than A Scandal in Bohemia.
   * more on this interview here
7. On that note, I’m immensely amused that you are so scandalised by the concept of Holmes and Watson being written into a romantic relationship, yet have no issues with the fact that the stories have been translated into the 21st century (a decision which, at Anatomy of a Hit, the writers stated they felt automatically provided them with ‘license to be heretical’), that Irene Adler was portrayed as a lesbian dominatrix, that the meaning of ‘RACHE’ was inverted, that the Reichenbach Falls were exchanged for St. Bart’s Hospital, that Mary Morstan was portrayed as a contract killer and that Charles Augustus’ surname was changed from Milverton to Magnussen to account for his change of nationality from English to Danish and that he was portrayed as the head of a media corporation.
8. There is nothing wrong with wanting something that you enjoy to happen on screen and hence be more accessible to you, particularly if that thing would also be socially beneficial by providing (much needed) positive representation to marginalised groups.
9. Shipping makes me happy. Fandom makes me happy. Sherlock makes me happy. It’s so unnecessarily rude of you to come into my ask box under the cowardly cover of anonymity to try to take that happiness away from me (you failed completely, I might add), when it literally affects you in exactly 0 ways.

So, in conclusion:

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Still one of my fav post